Cultural Proximity and Loan Outcomes
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
NBER WORKING PAPER SERIES CULTURAL PROXIMITY AND LOAN OUTCOMES Raymond Fisman Daniel Paravisini Vikrant Vig Working Paper 18096 http://www.nber.org/papers/w18096 NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138 May 2012 Thanks to Andres Lieberman and Sravya Mamadiana for outstanding research assistance. We would like to thank Abhijit Banerjee, Oriana Bandiera, Shawn Cole, Esther Duflo, Michael Kremer, Raghu Rajan, Antoinette Schoar, Paola Sapienza, Luigi Zingales, and the participants at the CFS-EIEF Conference on Household Finance, Columbia University, Boston University, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, London Business School, London School of Economics - Development, MIT-Sloan, the NBER conferences in corporate finance and household finance, Stockholm School of Economics, and Vienna University of Economics and Business for valuable feedback. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research. NBER working papers are circulated for discussion and comment purposes. They have not been peer- reviewed or been subject to the review by the NBER Board of Directors that accompanies official NBER publications. © 2012 by Raymond Fisman, Daniel Paravisini, and Vikrant Vig. All rights reserved. Short sections of text, not to exceed two paragraphs, may be quoted without explicit permission provided that full credit, including © notice, is given to the source. Cultural Proximity and Loan Outcomes Raymond Fisman, Daniel Paravisini, and Vikrant Vig NBER Working Paper No. 18096 May 2012 JEL No. D82,G21,J15 ABSTRACT We present evidence that shared codes, religious beliefs, ethnicity - cultural proximity - between lenders and borrowers improves the efficiency of credit allocation. We identify in-group preferential treatment using dyadic data on the religion and caste of bank officers and borrowers from a bank in India, and a rotation policy that induces exogenous matching between officers and borrowers. Cultural proximity increases lending on both intensive and extensive margins and improves repayment performance, even after the in-group officer is replaced by an out-group one. Further, cultural proximity increases loan dispersion and reduces loan to collateral ratios. Our results imply that cultural proximity mitigates informational problems that adversely affect lending, which in turn relaxes financial constraints and improves access to finance. Raymond Fisman Vikrant Vig School of Business London Business School Columbia University Regent's Park 622 Uris Hall London NW1 4S, UK 3022 Broadway [email protected] New York, NY 10027 and NBER [email protected] Daniel Paravisini Columbia University Graduate School of Business 3022 Broadway, Uris Hall 416 New York, NY 10027 and NBER [email protected] 1 Introduction Shared codes, language, religion, or culture between potential parties of a transaction can affect the likelihood that the transaction takes place, and also its outcome. Commonali- ties in religion and in ethnic origin, for example, are positively associated with trade flows between countries (Guiso, Sapienza and Zingales, 2009). The effect on efficiency of such cultural proximity between transacting parties is ambiguous, however. On the one hand, if members of a group tend to do business with one another for preference-based reasons, this may lead to discrimination or favoritism and result in the misallocation of resources. Alternatively, if cultural proximity reduces the cost of communication or contract enforce- ment, in-group transactions may be more efficient. Given these opposing views, the effect of cultural proximity on loan contracting remains an empirical question, something that we explore in this paper. There are a number of challenges in empirically identifying the extent of preferential in-group treatment, and distinguishing among the various explanations underlying such behavior. First, it requires information on the group membership of both transacting parties. Most studies have relied exclusively on the religion or race of only one side of the market, and have thus been best set up to detect discrimination against minorities rather than dyadic preferences for one's own type. This confounds any beneficial effect of in-group interactions with statistical or animus-based discrimination, especially when the in-group advantages are more prevalent within relatively small minority groups. Second, even when dyadic data are available, matching between parties is driven by the transac- tions' expected profitability, which is not observed by the econometrician. Unobservable profitability differences |for example, in the case where minority agents are relatively “unprofitable”— may result in finding no in-group preferences within minority groups even when one exists, or an in-group preference among majority groups even when none exists. Finally, it is difficult to assess the efficiency of outcomes in most economic trans- actions |the sale price of an automobile (as in Ayres and Siegelman, 1995), for example, largely involves the distribution of a fixed pie. 1 We use data from a large state-owned bank in India that provides a near-ideal setting for studying the extent and rationales for preferential in-group treatment in individual interactions with private information. Specifically, the setting makes it possible to ad- dress the three identification problems highlighted above. Detailed credit and personnel records allow us to match all borrowers and branch head officers to their religion and caste, providing a dyadic characterization of the cultural \distance" between transact- ing parties in the allocation of personal loans for close to three million borrowers over a five year period. An explicit officer rotation policy among branches provides variation in the matching between lenders and borrowers. We are thus able to control effectively for time-invariant attributes of borrowers and lenders, and for time varying credit conditions within narrowly defined geographic markets. Further, using detailed loan records, we can measure the effect of cultural proximity on ex ante loan contracting characteristics and ex post loan performance, and hence characterize the efficiency of transactions as well as the mechanisms driving the differences between in-group versus out-group interactions. In addition to the econometric advantages of our setting, the welfare implications of the relationship between cultural proximity and credit outcomes are likely to be of first order in an environment characterized by credit rationing and a long history of religious and caste conflict.1 We find strong evidence of preferential in-group treatment. In the baseline results we define two individuals to belong to the same group when both are members of the same minority religion (Christian; Muslim; Sikh; Parsi; Buddhist) or, conditional on belonging to the majority religion (Hindu), when both belong to the same official caste (General caste, Scheduled Caste, Scheduled Tribe, or Other Backward Classes). On average, the total amount of credit outstanding to borrowers in a group increases by 18.6% when the officer assigned to the branch belongs to the same group. Having an in-group officer also increases the number of borrowers by 6.2% and the probability that the group receives any credit by 1.6%. The results are robust to the inclusion of district-group-time dummies, and 1For evidence and discussions, see Banerjee, Cole, and Duflo 2004, Banerjee and Duflo 2008, and Field et al. 2008. 2 also the simultaneous inclusion of branch-time and group-time dummies. This indicates that the estimated effects are not driven by unobserved variation in the demand for credit by any group or at any locality, by policies that direct credit differentially to different groups and regions over time, or by reverse causality, where officers are transferred to areas where her group is thriving. The results are also robust to an alternate and independent classification where we use individuals' surnames to assign borrowers and officers based on the religious caste system that prevailed in ancient India. This rules out the possibility that the results are driven by systematic errors in the classification of individuals in the bank's records. Having established that borrower-officer cultural proximity has a causal effect on ac- cess to credit and the amount provided, we explore the economic mechanism behind this result by analyzing the effect of proximity on loan repayment and other dimensions of credit supply. Loans made to in-group borrowers have better repayment performance ex post. The economic magnitude of this effect is large: weighted by loan size, in-group borrowers are nearly 15% less likely to be late in loan payments, an effect that persists even after the in-group officer is replaced by an out-group one. This improvement in credit risk is recognized ex ante, as in-group loans are made with lower collateral ratios. Additionally, we observe that cultural proximity increases substantially the dispersion of lending across borrowers, implying that officers increase credit to some borrowers more than others within their own groups. These findings suggest that cultural proximity miti- gates problems of asymmetric information in lending and improves the allocation of credit across borrowers with heterogeneous repayment prospects. These effects dominate any negative impact of taste-based preferences on loan quality, as taste-based discrimination would lead |at least weakly| to a decline in average repayment